


It's a Cyber Punk World

by somethingsomething



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cyber Punk, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 11:43:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1817311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingsomething/pseuds/somethingsomething
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sketches from the Pan Pacific Grid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's a Cyber Punk World

**Author's Note:**

> I went on a tag spiral and [confabulatrix](http://confabulatrix.tumblr.com) gave me the side eye. Just brief sketches of what _Pacific Rim_ might look like if it were cyber punk.
> 
> Cyber punk is usually a lot more dystopian and has a lot more anti-heroes, but well. I played around with it a little and ended up with this.

Human civilization goes from the Stone Age to the Iron Age to the Bronze Age. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians come after, and then the Dark Ages, followed by the Middle Ages. The Victorians ran around the world imposing their views and histories. Industrial Revolutoin and Modern Age happen, and technology evolves at a heart-stopping speed. Clean energy is available in every home.

Eventually, cities grow to the point where the best way to get efficient energy to everyone, is to put them on a grid. The richest live around the core. The poorest, on the fringe.

Grids grow and grow until tendrils start to stretch across oceans and continents. There are gaps between the circuits though, and one day, a kaiju emerges.

No one knows who makes the kaiju, if maybe the Internet is finally large enough to be self-sufficient, self-aware, but they do know it takes three days to bring Trespasser down.

After the third kaiju, the first anatomical study is conducted. Newt Geiszler performs it, and finds that under the organic shell, is a cyber skeleton complete with brainware.

At a UN meeting later that year, Lars Gottlieb proposes to fight fire with fire.

 

During the testing phases, Sergio D’Onoforio starts to go into shock, and then neural failure, as the mods prove to be too great for one mind to handle. Doctor Caitlin Lightcap, who designed many of the mods, patches herself in. It’s a crude version of what will be developed within the next six months, but it works.

Caitlin Lightcap and Sergio D’Onoforio are the first successful Jaeger team.

 

Stacker Pentecost finds Raleigh Becket working in the lowest levels of Anchorage. Raleigh has been off the grid for five years, four months. It took Stacker three months of following clinic visits from a man with blue plasma running up and down his left arm, along with the occasional power outage, to find Raleigh.

When Stacker brings Raleigh to Hong Kong, he tells Raleigh that we’re not an army anymore, Mr. Becket, we’re the resistance. In truth, the PPDC has never been an army.

 

It’s called the United Nations, and it masquerades as a benevolent, democratic, representative entity that the world flocks to the first time the kaiju emerge from the gaps between the grid. In all actuality, it only cares about the rich and powerful. Legislation after legislation comes down, about walls and relocations and rations. In cities further inland, even the fringes see chocolate sometimes. On the Rim, 

The PPDC is formed by the UN, but they fight the kaiju as much as the representatives who keep the rich and powerful safe while ignoring the poor and unlucky on the fringes of the grid.

It takes eight months from the initiation of the PPDC’s Mark I mods before the PPDC is only nominally under the UN.

It’s another two years before the UN cuts all ties with the PPDC. They were waiting for a scandal big enough to keep people happy enough; Knifehead and the Beckets provide the perfect scapegoat.

Until Marshal Stacker Pentecost keeps the grid going in every Shatterdome on the Rim.

 

Raleigh and Stacker exit the transport onto a rainy Shatterdome helipad. Mako Mori is waiting under an umbrella, with a second one under her arm.

She turns to Stacker and says in Japanese, “He’s not what I expected.”

“Better or worse?” Raleigh asks with a smile, also in Japanese.

Mako smiles, falters, smiles again. “Apologies,” she says, “I have heard a lot about you.”

Mako is head of the Mark III Restoration Program, one of their brightest Mostly, she refines mods and programing, smoothes over glitches, streamlines processing, updates the HUDs.

They have one Drift chip left, and Stacker means to find Raleigh a Drift partner.

 

They call Drift pairs Jaegers. Pairs come from all over – prison guards, military, street orphans – and in all different sizes – siblings, lovers, strangers, even a father and son and a set of triplets.

The basic Drift chip has an HUD for battle statistics and sync and processor mods to link Drift pairs without a hard uplink cable. A neural uplink, Caitlin calls it.

“Fucking weird,” Yancy Becket says at the Academy years later after waking up with the Drift chip installed at the base of his brain stem. Raleigh grins at him from the next bed over.

Drift pairs add physical mods at it suits them. Raleigh and Yancy are young and come to the Academy with basic mods; pinky fingers that double as USB cords, data ports at the wrists and behind the right ear. A retinal mod for normal, night, and thermal vision.

Modding the Beckets to match each other is easy, and the Academy outfits them with plasma dischargers on their hands. Their elbow joints are replaced with mechanical joints to lock in place and increase speed.

Their drive suits are white and already scratched and worn by the time they head out to meet Knifehead on the fringes of the Anchorage grid. It’s 2:00 am when the alarm sounds. Raleigh is found at 8:00 am on the fringe, helmet shattered and left arm sparking plasma discharge.

Yancy is dead.

Raleigh leaves the PPDC six months later.

 

Mako shows Raleigh to his room. She stands at the door as he unwinds a rubber band from a stack of photos. It’s unusual, these days, to have actual pictures. Mako’s only seen them in museums.

“So what’s your story?” Raleigh asks. “Showing old has-beens like me around can’t be it.”

Mako tells him that she wants to be a Jaeger pilot, more than anything, and when she tell him her sim score, 51 drops, 51 kills, she swears his voice drops a little lower.

 

Other Jaeger pilots come into the program later in life, after more extensive physical mods.

Herc Hansen pilots with his brother Scott with Mark I mods. Herc pilots with his son Chuck four years later.

The Striker Eureka team has retractable twin blades in their wrists and microscopic muscle implants – seventy-five per muscle strand – designed to boost speed. The brainware is designed to mask Herc’s older hardware. It doesn’t always work, and the Hansen’s are the least coordinated team in the PPDC.

They also have the highest kill count.

 

Raleigh sends three candidates to the floor during trails, and after every match, he looks to Mako. She makes a face. Raleigh calls her out on it. She says the problem is him, not them.

Raleigh asks Stacker to change things up, give her a shot. Stacker says no. Mako asks and Stacker says no. Raleigh asks if he’s afraid that his best and brightest can’t cut in the ring. Stacker holds Mako’s clipboard.

Mako gives Raleigh two points, and puts him on his knees for her third. For the first time in five years, ten months, the chip at the back of Raleigh’s head stutters to life.

 

The Wei triplets pose a unique challenge to the PPDC. They’ll Drift together or not at all, they tell the PPDC. Caitlin Lightcap has been out of the Drift for a year or two now, she could use a challenge.

The triplets hover over her and Hermann Gottlieb’s shoulders while they write the code for a sync mod, and they send in their own drive suit designs that allow for more flexibility.

“It’s gotta have grace,” one of them says (no one can tell them apart, they mix jackets and name tags, and it doesn’t even matter that one wears sunglasses because they swap that, too).

“And _style_ ,” another one adds.

“Paint it bright red-” says the third.

“-with this, in gold-”

“-across the chest.”

Caitlin takes the sketch they hand her. She looks up at them over the rims of her glasses. “I think you three may have watched too many Iron Man cartoons as children,” she says.

All three laugh. “Doctor, we grew up on the fringes. If you wear red, they can’t see you bleed.”

 

Stacker Pentecost tells Raleigh that Mako won’t be his Drift partner.

Half an hour before Raleigh Drifts with his new partner, Stacker knocks on Mako’s door. She thinks its Raleigh come to argue for them to Drift together, forget the Marshal, but it’s Stacker.

He hands her a red shoe.

 

When Mako walks into the sim room, every nerve in Raleigh’s body lights up. His Drift chip whirs to life, and even though he’s going to be in her head in two minutes, Raleigh can’t help but tell her she looks good.

Mako smiles, and it falters again, before she settles on something that’s a little hesitant.

That’s okay. She’s gonna be inside his head in a minute anyway.

 

The Kaidonovskies are the last Mark I team. Nobody really knows anything about them, just that they’re from Russia, and that the grid went unbreached for eight years under their watch.

The only mod Sasha and Aleksis ever bothered with was Tesla fists. There’s more than one rumor that they only got them because the PPDC wouldn’t let them fight without _something_. As far as anyone’s seen, there’s only one fight where the Kaidonovskies actually used their mods.

The joke at the inception of the Jaeger program was that to fight monsters, we created monster of our own. The Kaidonovskies took that to heart, more than most.

 

In the Drift with Mako, Raleigh looks to his left and an old glitch pops up. His brain goes back to Knifehead, and it thinks he’s Yancy being torn out of the Drift.

Tendo Choi comes over the intercom. Raleigh only catches half of what he says, but there’s something about “You’re coming back online, but Mako’s chasing the R.A.B.I.T.”

 

In the Drift, Mako is eleven years old, and Onibaba comes to Tokyo. He makes his way onto the grid proper.

Stacker Pentecost takes down Onibaba and takes off his helmet. To a little girl who’s just lost her parents to a nightmare, Stacker looks like he has a halo around him.

In Hong Kong, Stacker tells Raleigh that there was a glitch in the Mark I Drift chips, a slow radiation leak. Tamsin Sevier caught the effects earlier, and seized in the Drift. Stacker bore the weight of the Drift for three hours.

Now, he’s dying of the same thing.

 

Doctor Newton Geiszler wants to see a kaiju up close. At the moment, the next best thing is a piece of brainware intact enough to hook a hardline up to. Newt drifts with the Kaiju and within the day, there’s a double event.

 

The kaiju are learning, and the Weis and Kaidonovskies go down within minutes of each other. Leatherback has an EMP blaster, and every wire for every mod the Hansens possess locks up.

Mako and Raleigh show up and take down Leatherback. They find Otachi in Hong Kong, face to face with Newt.

Otachi grabs a hold of Mako and Raleigh, intending to drop them from a height that will leave them a greasy smear on the grid. Raleigh apologies and says they’re out of options.

“No!” Mako says in Japanese, and there’s an option scrolling past their HUDs.

A chain sword unfolds from Mako and Raleigh’s right wrists at the same time, and they reach up.

“For my family!” Mako says. The swords go through Otachi like a hot knife through butter.

 

Twelve hours later, there’s the start of another double event.

 

In the hallway, Chuck kneels before his father after saying, “You don’t have to say them. I always knew.”

At the same time, Raleigh looks over at Mako. “You know,” he says, “I never really did think about the future until now. I always did have bad timing.”

Mako smiles at him. The first thing that Raleigh hears from her in the Drift is his words repeated at him and, _I’m glad it was you_.

 

The release on the bomb jams during a battle that goes from a double event to a triple with the emergence of Scunner.

“We can clear a path,” Stacker says. “For the lady.”

It only takes one to detonate the bomb, but Drift partners don’t leave each other.

“My father always said, if you have the shot, you take it,” Chuck says. “It’s been a pleasure, sir.”

 

There’s a physical space between the gaps in the circuits of the grid. Raleigh and Mako go into it.

Mako’s low on oxygen. Raleigh swaps their oxygen and takes the power core from the center of her drive suit.

Mako passes Raleigh a wire and he threads the two power cores together.

“I’m right behind you,” he says. It doesn’t count as leaving your copilot if you’re sending her on ahead of you.

Raleigh emerges from the Breach, unconscious and buoyed on the edges of the blast from their makeshift bomb.

Mako has a grappling hook mod from the days when she and Chuck thought they’d Drift together. She catches Raleigh on his way back down. He’s not breathing.

“Come home,” Mako tells Raleigh, holding him to her.

“You’re squeezing me too tight,” Raleigh says after her heart has been stopped for what feels like an eternity.

Mako laughs once, too worn for anything else.

Tendo says something about transport to pick them up, but Mako and Raleigh aren’t paying attention.

They’re too wrapped up in each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Have a thought? I'd love to hear it! Alternatively, you can always talk to me [here](http://bloglikejaeger.tumblr.com).
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
